We have a bit of a victory in the protest of Thomson Reuters and Aurora’s reference to InternationalWomensDay.com as the official IWD site. The word ‘official’ is no longer in their metatags. However the response I received this morning from Julia Fuller who is their Global Head of Corporate Responsibility still leaves quite a lot to be desired. Her letter and my response follow below.

I have no idea how many of you answered my original call to write to Aurora and Thomson Fuller regarding this usurpation of IWD for commercial gain, but apparently enough so that they are listening. Please please keep those letters up (Please write to InternationalWomensDay.com here and to Reuters here)–they are listening! In the meantime, we continue to call for a boycott of the site.

Dear Ms Marshall

Thank you for your emails. We have now looked into this matter.

The IWD website refers to Thomson Reuters as Global Partner and the website states: “The International Women’s Day website provides a free service to women around the world wanting to share and promote their IWD activity, videos, opinions and ideas. Please feel free to submit gender-related items for the site that you consider relevant and useful.”The word “official” is not used at any point on the website although it did appear in a piece of background html code. This word has now been removed from that background code.

It is clear that the IWD site does not purport to be “official”, but merely to act as a forum for individuals and organisations around the world to share and promote IWD activity, opinions and ideas. Thomson Reuters is wholly committed to equality in the workplace, transparency and accuracy and is proud to be working with Aurora and other individuals and organisations around the world to develop talent, encourage workplace diversity and to actively support organisations that share our commitment to these values. Thomson Reuters involvement with the IWD site extends to the provision of news feeds which contain gender relevant content around a number of themes including science and innovation, justice, health and business and finance. Hence our partnership is more refined than simply posting irrelevant Reuters news stories onto the site.

Please note, that Glenda Stone is not an employee or contractor at Reuters, but guest blogs on reuters.com, where it clearly states that her opinions are her own and not those of the company

InternationalWomensDay.com is not The site, there simply is no such thing and it is an affront to usurp that title from the thousands of women that work on IWD awareness throughout the world. The word ‘the’ should also be removed from your tags.

As to your assertion that, ” Thomson Reuters involvement with the IWD site extends to the provision of news feeds which contain gender relevant content around a number of themes including science and innovation, justice, health and business and finance. Hence our partnership is more refined than simply posting irrelevant Reuters news stories onto the site.”– I would disagree. Fully half of the tabs at the top of the page are to Reuters content. Here are some of the stories linked to on your business page. I have no idea what these have to do with International Women’s Day or why these are considered gender-relevant:

The other pages of links are equally irrelevant to IWD. On your page about jobs, there is no source information, just data that is irrelevant if people don’t know where it came from. There are a number of excellent sources for news stories that are relevant to IWD and women’s human rights. The Feminist Peace Network blog references this sort of story on a regular basis and I would be happy to help you build a database of relevant news sources.

Finally, I am wondering if you consulted with any of the major women’s organizations that work with global women’s human rights organizations before you organized this page. While developing talent and workplace diversity are important, they are only a part of what IWD is about and for a website like this to truly work there should certainly be some sort of advisory board that reflects non-commercial interests within the global women’s advocacy community. I see no evidence of that here.

I hope that you will give this matter the further consideration it deserves.

There you have it–please keep writing to them. IWD is our day and this sort of cause-branding is reprehensible and unacceptable and it needs to stop. If you do write, please send a copy to fpn@feministpeacenetwork.org.